Victoria is German heist movie about a Spanish woman who teams up with a group of local Berliners to rob a bank. The movie shows the lead up, the heist, and the aftermath. Sounds like a good movie, right? Interesting, if a little clichéd, premise. Here’s the thing, though. Victoria has a trick up its sleeve, and it’s a hell of a trick.

The entire movie was shot in a single, more than two hours long, unbroken take. No edits, no CGI, no Birdman tricks. One unbroken shot lasting the entire film.

Due to that fact alone, Victoria is an amazing achievement. The amount of planning, coordination, and skill required to pull off something this ambitious is mind-boggling. (Victoria is only the sixth feature film to try such a feat, and is the longest one-shot film to date by almost 20 minutes. It supposedly took three attempts to film.) The camera weaves through streets, down alleyways, in and out of cars, in low light and bright pulsing clubs, peering over ledges at just the right moment to capture a key bit of action. It’s incredible to watch. It’s also a testament to the cast’s stellar acting that I briefly forgot that the unbroken take was still going.

Victoria herself acts as a conduit for the audience, an avatar character the camera always follows around, so we always see the action from her point of view. Limiting the camera’s view in some cases and sticking with a faux handheld filming style—not quite found footage, but jerky at parts—adds a great deal of immediacy to the events that unfold over the course of the film. It’s as if the audience is another player in the film, another character getting dragged along on the increasingly dangerous ride. A sense of urgency permeates through the whole film. Part of it is because of the story, and part of it is secretly hoping an actor won’t mess up and ruin the whole take.

Much like how Birdman used the single shot conceit to underscore the story of a live Broadway performance, Victoria uses an even more impressive parlor trick to emphasize its story. A heist film lends itself well to be shot in a continuous take. Just as a heist or a bank robbery needs to have a plan, meticulously and carefully thought out and executed, so too does the entire movie. If even one actor misses their mark, the whole thing is kaput. It adds an underlying feeling of tension to the whole movie, a feeling that at any moment something could go wrong. It’s really unbelievable—it has to be seen to be believed.

The few areas that suffer in service to the central editing trick are story and pacing. The story, like mentioned briefly earlier, is a fairly standard run of the mill heist story. I was never really surprised by anything that happened in Victoria, which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but is still a bit disappointing. There’s also some pacing acrobatics, mainly to justify the whole story taking place over two hours in real time. Action happens pretty rapidly, and some events that take place, namely the transitions and motivations for their occurrence, just aren’t realistic. Real people would never do these things this quickly.

But you know what? I didn’t really care. I didn’t care that I predicted almost everything that happened in Victoria, or that certain plot elements were sped way up to justify everything happening in real time. I was so mesmerized by the immediacy of it all, the fantastic camera work, the excellent acting. Victoria is a hell of a ride and an unbelievable achievement in filmmaking.Grade: B

Amy comes from Asif Kapadia, the director of Senna, one of my favorite documentaries. It so cohesively and fully told the ultimately tragic story of Ayrton Senna using only archival footage, and it felt like Senna himself was telling the story. Amy uses a similar approach, overlaying interviews with Winehouse’s parents, friends, and music business partners with news footage and home recordings. Even if it’s a little less effective and engaging than Senna, Amy is a well crafted and fascinating documentary that sheds new light on Amy Winehouse’s rise and descent.

Amy doesn’t spend too much time on Winehouse’s childhood, starting off at the beginning of her music career. Scenes of Winehouse picking up a guitar and casually singing a tender jazz lament speak to her affinity for pure jazz and to her amazing amounts of raw talent. Watching her in the studio singing “Back to Black” is mesmerizing. Early interviews show her pure and frank feelings towards music, and are a painful litmus test for her physical and emotional decline—in one of her last interviews she looks barely functional, staring blankly into the distance and repeating herself multiple times without saying anything of meaning. Amy is heartbreaking, especially in its latter half as Winehouse achieves worldwide fame, is hounded relentlessly by paparazzi, and begins to descend into drug addiction and alcoholism coupled with bulimia and depression.

The “archival footage only” modus operandi Kapadia uses worked wonders for Senna because there was a wealth of video of the subject, from race broadcasts to interviews to home videos. Kapadia was able to knit those together and use newly recorded interviews to color the footage and build a beautiful portrait of Ayrton Senna as a driver and a man. But the same technique somehow feels inadequate for Amy. Rather than enhancing the portrait of the artist, there’s always the sense of something limiting about Kapadia’s signature style. Sometimes it feels like there’s just too much going on, with voiceover interviews with her friends and family over footage of her singing in the studio. Each of those are fascinating to watch and listen to separately, but overlaying them to stick to the No Talking Heads rule is restrictive here.

Sometimes, Amy gets too melodramatic for its own good, if rarely. One thing I especially loved about Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, another documentary about a genius musician who battled personal demons and died young, was its use of Nirvana songs throughout the entire film, from a lullaby rendition of “Lithium” to a chamber orchestra arrangement of “Something in the Way.” Amy spends a lot of time showing Winehouse performing and recording, even showing the lyrics as she sings in a kind of karaoke-style graphic, but there’s also a lot of original music written for the film, especially at the end. By original music, I mean in addition to the Amy Winehouse songs in the film there is also an original score composed by Antonio Pinto. I love music in movies, but in a documentary about a musician, having an additional original score is unnecessary. Her story is awful and tragic, yes, but we can understand that without cutting to slowed down footage of her staring longingly off screen while dramatic orchestral music plays in the background. Amy, for all its highlights, dips into Lifetime-esque montages sometimes.

I’ve tried my hardest not to spend this entire review comparing Amy to Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and Senna, but comparisons are unavoidable given the similar subject matters. Director Brett Morgen in Montage of Heck experimented with the documentary format and often delved into surrealistic painted sequences depicting formative moments in Cobain’s life, while Amy sticks to concert footage and home videos. Morgen also had mountains of old personal materials to go through and he makes such a more complete and beautiful portrait of his subject than Kapadia makes.

I really wanted to love Amy, but it just didn’t hit me as hard as either Senna or Montage of Heck. Let me put it like this. Montage of Heck feels like the definitive documentary about Kurt Cobain, like spending two hours with the man himself and really understanding who he was as an artist and a person. It’s not entirely clear whether Amy really does capture the essence of who Amy Winehouse was as a singer and a person.

I adore Brad Bird as a director. He’s made some of my favorite movies from my childhood: The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and The Iron Giant, which is one of the few movies that makes me sob like a baby every single time I watch it without fail. He’s also proven he can direct live action very well with the series reboot Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. So I was very excited for Tomorrowland, which seemed to play to all of Bird’s strengths—family-friendly fun, action, science fiction and dazzling visuals, all with heart and soul.

Casey (Britt Robertson), brilliant and ever optimistic, discovers a pin that, when she touches it, transports her to a futuristic wonderland. Soon she meets Athena (Raffey Cassidy), the young girl who gave her the pin, and Frank (George Clooney), who visited the far off place—Tomorrowland— in his youth. All three of them get tangled in forces beyond their control—or so they think. I’m keeping the synopsis intentionally vague; I went in to Tomorrowland almost completely blind, having next to no idea what to expect. That’s mostly due to the fantastically ambiguous marketing job by Disney, and partially to me covering my ears and going lalalala during trailers.

For a Disney movie, Tomorrowland throws out a lot of big philosophical ideas. It dabbles in utopia and dystopia, global warming, revolution, even the nature of humans as a species and a society. I was struck by its similarity in some respects to the masterpiece video game Bioshock, where a utopian city attracts the brightest minds all across the world in all different fields to freely create and explore, unfettered by politics or laws or ethical concerns. Of course, Bioshock is incredibly dark and violent and deals with ethical and philosophical issues way over the heads of the PG moviegoing crowd, but Tomorrowland at least tries to be a blockbuster that makes kids think. It may reduce the complexity of its concepts down to a middle school reading level, but that intellectual core is still there.

In a lot of ways, Tomorrowland is Brad Bird’s love letter to innovation. Casey’s father is a soon-to-be out of work NASA engineer; Frank built a jetpack when he was nine years old. These are people who dream big, who don’t give up, who use their brains to accomplish amazing things. There’s a sense of nostalgia permeating through the whole film, from the retro-futuristic aesthetic of Tomorrowland to the way Casey talks about the future with such optimism and hope. It’s the same kind of nostalgia I felt when I watched Interstellar, a feeling of amazement at what we small humans can accomplish at our best. That’s Tomorrowland’s strongest feature: its inescapable sense of wonder. It’s as if Bird has captured the essence of discovery and put it to film. It’s like going on a Disney ride for the first time. (Tomorrowland is also the name of a section of the Magic Kingdom at Disney World. What a crazy and totally unintentional coincidence!)

Tomorrowland is trying to inspire a new generation of kids, and the film does more than throw a lot of You Can Do It! speeches in a shiny CGI wrapper. The film is about inspiration, invention, wonder; it’s the thread that holds the whole thing together and appeals to adults’ sense of nostalgia and kids’ ever-present curiosity. The world is dying, the film asserts. What are you doing to fix it?

I’m studying abroad in Berlin, Germany, this semester as part of Northeastern’s Architecture program. The 65th Berlin International Film Festival recently came to a close here. However, unlike Cannes and Sundance and Venice and other cream-of-the-crop film festivals, you don’t have to be George Clooney to get in. Tickets are readily accessible by the general public, even dirty American hipsters like me. Of course, almost all the competition films sold out immediately—Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog both premiered new films here—but I did manage to snag tickets to three screenings: a music movie about a tortured genius, a documentary, and a music documentary about a tortured genius.

My first screening came on opening weekend, at the Kino International, a gorgeous theater built in the 1960s. I saw was the German premiere of Cobain: Montage of Heck, a documentary about late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Cobain’s life and struggles have been extensively documented elsewhere, but never in such intimate fashion. Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow, and Frances Bean Cobain, his daughter, gave director Brett Morgen completely unfettered access to massive amounts of Cobain’s personal materials that no one had seen before: notebooks filled with journal entries, doodles, drawings, cartoons, letters, paintings, spoken word, “sound montages,” private recordings. The result is as complete a picture of Kurt Cobain as we’ve seen, and it’s hard to see this as anything other than the definitive Kurt Cobain documentary. Montage of Heck lets Cobain’s own material tell his story, rather than extensive interviews with outside parties. It reminded me a lot of the fantastic Senna in that regard: very few talking head interviews, lots of archival footage, letting the subject speak for himself. We see words write themselves in his journals, doodles come to life, all backed by Cobain’s own recordings. Everything we see and hear was Kurt. (Bonus points for lullaby arrangements of “Lithium” and “All Apologies” during Cobain’s childhood videos, a string quartet arrangement of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” during one of Cobain’s recorded anecdotes, and a haunting chorale arrangement of the same during a montage of the song’s famous music video.) Seeing everything come together, watching this artistic genius rise and explode onto the scene and fall so dramatically is heartbreaking to watch; it’s all so clear looking back. When she saw the final cut of the film, Courtney Love said it was like she had had two more hours with Kurt, and I can’t help but feel the same way. It does such a fantastic job of not just focusing on Cobain’s work, his childhood, his disenfranchisement as a teenager, but putting it all together and letting him tell his own story. Montage of Heck was clearly put together with a lot of love, and the end result is beautiful and heartbreaking.

After the film, director Brett Morgan gave a short Q&A, where he thanked Courtney Love (who was there with former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe! They sat a few rows behind me and I was kind of totally star-struck for a second okay I’m done) for allowing such total access to such personal materials. He told us that he didn’t use a lot of interview footage of Cobain because in his view this was the least genuine source available. He was putting on his public face, Morgan said. He notoriously hated interviews My one gripe I had with the film was the total lack of Dave Grohl. There wasn’t a single interview with the Nirvana drummer. Someone asked Morgen about this, and he said that their schedules just didn’t line up. (Which, okay, I get, but you were working on this thing for eight years, dude. You’re telling me your schedules didn’t line up once during that entire span?) He also said something I found interesting: that he didn’t feel like he needed to interview both other members of Nirvana to get a full picture of Kurt Cobain. (Which, okay, I also get, Cobain wasn’t just the frontman of Nirvana, but come on. Nirvana was a huge part of his life and Dave Grohl is fucking Dave Grohl.) Apparently Morgen and Grohl did end up sitting down for an interview, and Morgen was working hard to edit in his interview into the final cut to be screened on HBO in May.

The second film I saw was at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, another beautiful theater built in the 1960s. The Look of Silence, which was one of my most anticipated films for 2015 because it’s the sequel of sorts to one of my favorite films of 2013, Joshua Oppenheimer’s excellent, gut-wrenching documentary The Act of Killing. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s on Netflix. Warning, though: it’s difficult to watch.) While The Act of Killing focused on the perpetrators of the terrible genocide in Indonesia in 1965, The Look of Silence turns its focus to the victims, specifically one family. Mercifully, The Look of Silence is easier to watch (though not by much), and brings the Indonesian genocide down to a more human, intimate scale. We see one family’s struggle with mourning their dead, having to deal with seeing his murderers daily in the village and the constant threat of living under their shadow. The meat of The Look of Silence, though, is protagonist Adi’s confrontations with the very people who murdered his brother 50 years ago. Under the pretense of an optical exam, he visits killer after killer and asks them about what Indonesia is like now and what has changed before dropping the bombshell that his brother was one of the victims. There are scenes so riveting and so disgusting that I was almost physically nauseous. After seeing The Act of Killing, I was shocked and disgusted, and I was sure that this was the end of the story. After seeing The Look of Silence, it’s impossible for me to view the two films as anything other than a pair, each requiring the other. The two of them together highlight such an important historical event and raise incredibly difficult questions about politics and human morality. What does it mean for a country to undergo such a tragedy and not have that healing process or open dialogue afterwards? What happens to generations afterwards if the political situation in that country doesn’t change? The Act of Killing introduced those questions, and The Look of Silence brings them down to a more personal, more human scale.

Following the film there was a Q&A with Joshua Oppenheimer (!) and executive producer Werner Herzog (!!!). They discussed the safety, or lack thereof, of Oppenheimer, his crew, and the subjects of the film; Oppenheimer can never safely return to Indonesia, he said. He also commented about the first time he came to Indonesia, at the start of the project some ten years ago. He said it was like stepping into Germany 40 years after WWII, except the Nazis were still in power. That gives you a sense of just how insane and incredibly dangerous this project was. He commented on what allows people to commit such terrible acts; in his view, there has to be a certain amount of selfishness and shallowness. Herzog himself also commented on what separates documentaries like this from pure journalism. There’s a certain amount of artfulness to the way in which things are presented in the two films, scenes that aren’t necessary to the story Oppenheimer is telling but that add to the atmosphere and get the audience thinking. Oppenheimer also repeatedly referred to the two documentaries as a diptych, while Herzog chimed in that they really form a triptych, with the third part being the literally thousands of hours of footage Oppenheimer and his crew shot that are going to be made readily available to historians, researchers, and the general public in some form.

The third and final film I saw at the Berlinale came on the closing night of the festival, at the Berlinale Palast. This was the theater where they also had the award ceremony the day before. The film was Love & Mercy, a biopic about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. The movie has an interesting structure, at least for a biopic. It jumps back and forth between “past” Brian (played by Paul Dano) in the early 1960s, as he’s writing Pet Sounds and Smile and slowly declining into a mental breakdown; and “future” Brian (played by John Cusack) in the late 1980s, constantly on antipsychotic meds and under the constant watch of Dr. Eugene Landy. It’s a unique way to tell a true story, and it’s fitting for a man with a unique and multi-faceted as Brian Wilson. It just never comes together the way it should.

The “past” scenes are excellent, bolstered by a fantastic, pained performance from Paul Dano. He plays Brian beautifully as a genius emotionally strained by the people around him and tortured by the demons in his head. You can almost feel the songs waiting to burst out of him. The script is over-explain-y at times—there’s more than one instance where Dano literally says how revolutionary his new songs are and how they’re just flowing out of him—but the 60s atmosphere is airtight and watching Wilson descend into hard drug use and mental illness is affecting and fascinating. Which makes it all the more painful that the “future” scenes just aren’t as good. First of all, it’s not as interesting a story watching the old music icon enter a courtship with a Cadillac saleswoman. Elizabeth Banks is great in her role, and Paul Giamatti chews a heck of a lot of scenery as the fiery Dr. Landy. The problem, then, is John Cusack. Don’t get me wrong; he’s a great actor, and he’s proven that. He’s just not right for the role. It wasn’t like watching an older Brian Wilson dealing with past issues and trying to scape a domineering doctor; it was like watching John Cusack playing a character with mental issues and a past drug habit. And not having that center character forces the “future” scenes slightly off-kilter. I felt like I was watching a different story altogether than the “past” scenes, and not in a good way. Maybe that was the point. You know that moment in Memento when the black and white slowly fades into color, and everything we’d seen before snaps into focus? I was waiting for that moment in Love & Mercy, and it never came. By the end of the film, it still felt like two disparate stories that never quite converged.

Never in a million years did I think I’d be able to go to a film festival, let alone one of the most renowned in the world, and my experience at the Berlinale was one I won’t soon forget. I had the opportunity to see parts of the city I hadn’t before, rub elbows with some celebrities, hear filmmakers talk about their work intimately, and see some fantastic films too.

10. Foxcatcher

Director Bennett Miller’s third feature film is a fine movie, if a bit slow going and aimless at times, but what make Foxcatcher so memorable are the fantastic performances at its core. Steve Carell is visually unrecognizable as John du Pont, imbuing him with a disturbingly calm demeanor masking a lot of issues, psychological and otherwise. Mark Ruffalo is just as good as Dave Schultz, conveying worlds of emotion with little dialogue. Criminally overlooked, though, is Channing Tatum’s powerhouse performance as Mark Schultz, a brute of a man desperately trying to step out from his brother’s shadow but never quite able to find the words to do so. Like Ruffalo, Tatum is able to show us so much about Mark with just physicality and body language. Those three performances make Foxcatcher a worthy addition to Miller’s impressive filmography and a haunting, disturbing film to sit through.

9. The Wind Rises

Hayao Miyazaki's swan song (kind of) is unlike anything he's done before, but at the same time it's exactly what we expect from the Japanese animation master. The world he creates here isn't one where cat buses roam the countryside or where witches deliver packages or where spirits let off steam in bathhouses, but it's no less fantastical. Rather, it follows Jiro Horikoshi, the creator of the Zero plane used by Japan during WWII. In Jiro's eyes—and Miyazaki's—his planes are living, breathing, fantastical creatures, sputtering and whirring and growling with real acapella sound effects and soaring across fields of grass and endless oceans. It’s a film only Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli could make.

*I’m counting this for 2014 because it had its wide theatrical release this past year, even though it was technically considered a 2013 release by the Oscars.*

8. Interstellar

Gravity (my top film of 2013) showed us the sheer wonder (and horror) of humankind traversing into space with some of the most impressive visuals ever put on film. Christopher Nolan’s space opera, then, shows us what space travel means: how it affects the astronauts and their families back on Earth, and what traveling deeper into the infinite black says about the human species as a whole and as individuals. The result is stunning: visually arresting, stacked with great performances, and simply beautiful. I was riveted for the entire movie by both what I was seeing and how everything was falling into place and fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s the blockbuster version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Does its reach exceed its grasp? Sure, but what would you expect in a movie dealing with nothing less than our place in the cosmos, dimensions beyond our own, and the very nature of human existence?

7. Snowpiercer

Snowpiercer builds a terrifying world that unfolds before us; as Chris Evans and his gang move farther up the train, they meet an ever more colorful cast of characters led by Tilda Swinton, who gives a simply ridiculous performance Mason, like a demented Margaret Thatcher drenched in arrogance and cruelty. And as they traverse closer to the engine, we learn more and more about the nature of the world, who built the train, and how humanity got there in the first place. Throw in some insane bloody violence, very non-American storytelling techniques, and some ruminations on the human will to survive, and you’ve got the best and most stylish science fiction movie of the year.

6. The Grand Budapest Hotel

Freeing himself from the confines of his usual themes—family struggles, growing older—Wes Anderson makes a caper film as finely crafted as anything he's done so far. Meticulous tableaus tastefully adorned in pastels suddenly give way to spurts of surprisingly graphic violence, only to switch again to a genuinely silly chase scene down a ski slope. Ralph Fiennes gives one of the year's best performances as Gustave H., the hotel manager who’s always tidy and curt and civil, even in the face of cruelty and ridiculousness. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson at his most unabashedly fun.

5. Birdman

Birdman is a lot of things. It’s a glimpse at the creative process and the immense amount of work that goes into putting on a stage production. It’s a surprisingly critical look at the state of the blockbuster movie industry and the glut of CGI-laden explosion orgies that get pumped out every summer. It’s the thundering return of Michael Keaton to the spotlight with an Oscar-worthy performance. But, maybe more than anything, Birdman is a cinematic experience unlike anything this year. If there was any production feat to rival that of Boyhood’s 12-year creation, it's Birdman's seemingly continuous single take for the duration of the film. It's so compelling to watch, and it works not just as a show-off-y gimmick. In a movie about a production of a Broadway play, seeing the action unfold in real time before our eyes couldn’t fit any better.

4. Whiplash

What does it take to achieve greatness? Is pushing past comfort zones to produce the next great creative force justified, even if fifty other prodigies get torn down in the aftermath? A dark, stomach-churning look inside a prestigious music conservatory and the relationship between an aspiring jazz drummer and his brutal, abusive mentor, Whiplash rides on the electric chemistry between Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons, who finally gets the role he’s deserved for his entire career. And that’s to say nothing of newcomer Damien Chazelle’s fantastic direction, creating more tension and discomfort than any other movie I’ve seen this year—in a movie about a jazz drummer, no less. Oh, and it also has the best ending I’ve seen in a long, long time, a third act that had me literally on the edge of my seat with my heart in my throat and my insides in knots.

3. The Lego Movie

If there were an award for Best Movie No One Expected To Be This Good, The Lego Movie would win by a landslide. A perfectly mediocre movie about one of the most popular toys in the world, with this many licensed properties and this much star power behind it, would still have been a hit. And yet Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s creation is nothing short of spectacular. Every single aspect of The Lego Movie is filled with joy and creativity: the characters, the stellar voice acting, the unbelievably meticulous world building (pun definitely intended) and attention to detail. The Lego Movie is by far the most fun I had at the movies this year, and it stands as one of my favorite animated movies ever.

2. Only Lovers Left Alive

Tired orangey streetlights illuminate dark, twisting, hilly alleyways in the desert city of Tangiers as Eve strolls from bar to bar, twang-y lutes playing in the background. Detroit at night is shrouded in a blanket of pitch black, and Adam’s house, where he covertly makes slow, sexy post-rock records, is a collection of scattered relics of music technology of the past century. Jim Jarmusch’s moody tale of immortal vampires in love doesn’t have any special-effects-laden action sequences, or any mind-bending plot twists, or even any steamy sex scenes. No, Only Lovers Left Alive just follows Adam and Eve around, and we see a glimpse into the pair’s little world: what a love hundreds of years old looks and feels like, how two beings that have existed for so long interact with the world, and how they see each other and humanity. And, more than anything, Only Lovers Left Alive is a love story, sensual and dark and lazy and fascinating, beautifully realized with gorgeous cinematography and incredible music and brought to life with two stellar lead performances in Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston. It’s the most quietly unique movie of the year.

1. Boyhood

Boyhood is unquestionably the most ambitious movie of the year, its 12-year production crazy to even think about. (Richard Linklater had no way of knowing that an offhand remark about Roger Clemens or about how there would never be another Star Wars movie would have made a good joke five, ten years later.) But Boyhood is the best movie of the year because the finished product makes the incredible production worth it. Unfolding like a series of vignettes that bleed into each other, the story of Mason Jr. and his family is so powerful because of how real it is. It’s the most accurate and powerful snapshot of American life in the 2000s because it’s not a snapshot—it’s a photo album. There are no clear demarcations from year to year; the movie just happens. And as the film progresses, Boyhood becomes not just the story of a boy growing up into a young adult. It's about a sister who goes through phases in looks and attitudes. It's about a rebellious father who learns that he, too, needs to grow up. It's about a single mother who jumps from husband to husband while trying to savor each and every moment with her kids, who are growing up way too fast. Boyhood is about life, how the moments that we remember are the ones in the interstitial space, and that message resonates in a way only a film like this can make it. Boyhood is an incredible achievement, unlike anything we’ve seen before, and one that will be remembered for years to come.

Honorable Mentions

The long-gestating film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical about intertwining fairy tales is finally here. After years of living in film development purgatory, some 20 or so years after it was first conceived, Into the Woods has arrived. And it is glorious.

First of all, everyone in the all-star cast is so spot-on and so perfectly cast. Meryl Streep is, of course, fantastic as the Witch, totally dominating every scene she’s in. James Corden and Emily Blunt as the Baker and his wife, respectively, anchor the whole film together with their energetic performances—and my goodness can Blunt sing. Her performance of “Moments in the Woods” blew me away. It’s hard to think of a more perfect Cinderella than Anna Kendrick, and her rendition of “On the Steps of the Palace” is probably my favorite song of the film. Even the two youngest members of the cast, Lilla Crawford as Red Riding Hood and Daniel Huttlestone as Jack, hold their own in the songs with the older cast members and really shine in their solos. And Chris Pine… my goodness, Chris Pine. His Prince Charming is as over-the-top and as ridiculous as he should be, chivalrous to a fault and a total narcissistic twit. And his version of “Agony” with Billy Magnussen’s Prince was PERFECT and easily one of my favorite scenes in a movie this year. Fans of the original won’t be complaining how a cast member ruined their favorite song in the show, because everyone in the cast is great and no one drops the ball.

I really have to commend director Rob Marshall for staying so faithful to the already fantastic original musical. Part of the allure of the source material is that we see these familiar fairy tale characters in the interstitial space between their stories: we never see Cinderella at the ball or Jack being chased by giants. And the stories we do see have a dark twist: the relationship between Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, for example, takes a creepily sexual tilt in the musical. The point is that a lot of the action takes place offstage, with the bulk of what we see onstage being characters from different stories interacting with each other and impacting the consequences of their tales. And, by and large, Into the Woods sticks by that idea.

Mercifully, Into the Woods is not special-effects heavy except when it needs to be. More often than not, scenes in the film feel like a very well done stage production: not drowning in special effects or an overabundance of color correction, but rather filmed in relatively small-scale points in the woods with long camera takes. The incredibly intricate stories and songs can speak for themselves. Marshall could easily have indulged himself and taken advantage of opportunities that film as a medium presents that would be more difficult in a stage production. And he does do that, but only a few times. The vast majority of what we see onscreen could easily have been done in a stage production, and the result is a film that still feels intimate and full of heart. There’s also a surprisingly small amount cut out from the source material. There are a few changes here and there, but nothing major, and those changes mostly deal with cutting songs or certain characters to make things more streamlined and movie-friendly. A lot of the weird, dark stuff—fans of the musical will know what I’m talking about—is still there. The film still reaches the same end result, however, with all the emotional oomph as before.

Into the Woods is fantastic and it’s the way a movie musical should be: faithful to the source material, taking advantage of new opportunities the medium presents, but not overly so. Fans of the original stage musical (like myself) will be excited to see the show come to life on the big screen, and newcomers will find plenty to enjoy, too.

A little girl named Annie with curly bright red hair stands up at the front of her social studies class giving a presentation on William Henry Harrison. When she’s finished reciting her paper, she does a little tap dance and smiles brightly at her class. All the kids roll their eyes as she sits back down. Another girl, Annie B., African-American but with an equally frizzy mop of hair, now walks to the front of the classroom to recite her project on Franklin D. Roosevelt. But her project is different: she gets the class to bang on their desks and clap in unison to illustrate how FDR helped the poor.

So begins Annie, the fourth film adaptation of the classic stage musical about a young orphan girl looking for her real parents. This one, however, promises to be a “contemporary reimagining” of the classic story, which essentially means bringing the story into the present day—where these young girls have access to smartphones and Twitter, where Miss Hannigan is a former frontwoman of a pop band, and where Daddy Warbucks (now called Will Stacks) is a cellphone company mogul running for mayor of New York City.

Okay, let’s start with the good first. Annie is actually decently well written. I laughed out loud at most of the jokes, and there’s rarely a bit that flat-out doesn’t work. Given director Will Gluck’s work on Easy A, this isn’t surprising. Cameron Diaz is delightfully ridiculous as Miss Hannigan, as she should be.

In every other aspect, Annie fails.

Annie is a musical, and the most important part of any musical is the music. What that means for the songs in the musical is one of two things: either 1) it’s essentially the same song but with a hip-hop beat underneath, as is the case with the big numbers like “Tomorrow” and “It’s Hard Knock Life;” or 2) the song is totally rewritten to sound like any other radio-friendly hit out today. “Little Girls” and “I Don’t Need Anything But You” are totally unrecognizable, save for the lyrics. There’s even a new song written by Sia that sounds like… well, a Sia song. Annie wouldn’t even be a success if they had kept the original music because the vocal performances are so wildly inconsistent. Quvenzhané Wallis is perfectly fine as Annie, but the syncing of her vocals to her on-screen Annie makes it painfully obvious she’s not really singing. Jamie Foxx goes all-out with his R&B riffs and it’s totally out of place. I don’t even remember how Cameron Diaz sounded, but it was probably fine, I guess. And Bobby Canavale… never have I heard such atrocious singing in a musical since Russell Crowe in Les Misérables. The backing music is also so horribly mixed that it sounds like a mushy blob of sound underneath the vocals. What I’m getting at is that the songs in Annie are bad. Really, really bad. And a musical with bad songs is a bad musical.

Annie feels like an unnecessary update to a perfectly fine musical. Most changes don’t work, some are downright cringe-worthy, and the vocal performances just aren’t there. If you really want to watch a musical about a spunky orphan girl wandering the streets of New York City looking for her parents, watch the original one.

The Imitation Game is a long-overdue biopic about mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), who played an instrumental role in breaking the Nazi Enigma code during WWII. He was also gay, and was prosecuted by the British government for homosexual acts before committing suicide. He’s a tragic, incredibly important figure in world history, and his life deserves a proper treatment on film.

So is Cumberbatch up to the challenge? Of course he is, he’s Benedict Cumberbatch. I honestly was concerned he would basically be playing Sherlock in the 1940s, but his performance as Turing is much more than that. He stutters, and pauses in his patterns of speech because his mind is clearly working faster than his mouth can form the words to express what he’s thinking. Turing is a genius, and that comes across loud and clear in Cumberbatch’s performance without seeming overwrought or showy. In a year not nearly as crowded with amazing male performances as last year, he’s a lock for an Oscar nomination.

The large majority of the film focuses on Turing's efforts in cracking the Enigma code, and it breaks down the work he does so the audience can digest it. It admirably goes very deep into why Turing's method was so revolutionary. It details which methods were traditionally used in code-breaking, how exactly Turing’s machine worked, and how the machine and Turing’s intellect came together to finally crack the Enigma code. It also makes the potentially tedious and boring minutia of code-breaking very entertaining to watch. Turing’s personal life, however, takes a back seat. The film doesn’t skirt over Turing's homosexuality exactly, but a real examination of that part of him only makes up one extended scene near the end of the film. There is basically no mention of his larger contributions to modern computers either, save for a footnote at the end.

It’s impossible not to compare The Imitation Game to the other period-set British genius biopic to come out this year: The Theory of Everything, about the life of Stephen Hawking. The two films’ approach to their subjects differs, however. If The Theory of Everything shows us why Stephen hawking is to be admired for the obstacles he's overcome but not necessarily for the work he did—according to the film--The Imitation Game is the opposite. Alan Turing was a genius and an integral part of winning WWII, but the fact that he was gay and took his own life doesn't matter as much. At least, according to the film.

Those are relatively minor issues in an altogether very good movie. Anchored by a fantastic performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game is the way a biopic should be done: exciting, entertaining and very enlightening.

Aspiring 19-year-old jazz drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) is just beginning his first year at the most prestigious music school in the country. He catches the eye of Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), a teacher and music director of the best big-band ensemble in the school. Fletcher chooses the young Andrew to join his band because he sees in him a talent and a drive to be one of the greats. Okay, wherever you think this is going, I can promise you you’re wrong. You probably think this is going to be a ­Dead Poets Society-type deal, where the charismatic teacher helps a troubled student realize his full potential and even learns something about himself along the way. No no no. Whiplash simultaneously chronicles of an abusive relationship and an epic battle of two creative minds while providing a dark look into the creative process. If you want an uplifting teacher/student drama, look elsewhere. Now, Miles Teller is great, yes. His moments of meekness are just as compelling and believable as his moments of anger and egotism. But as good as he is, J. K. Simmons is just in another world. It’s so great to see him finally break out into a near-leading role after having been relegated to smaller roles in the past, like J. Jonah Jameson in the original Spider-Man trilogy and the voice of Tenzin in The Legend of Korra on Nickelodeon. Fletcher simmers with rage constantly, and his calm, stoic moments are just as terrifying as his fire-breathing outbursts. It’s the rare performance that is loud and showy not just for the sake of it. He is horrifying, manipulative, and impossible to stop watching. The two of them take the mentor and mentee dynamic to twisted, twisted depths. Fletcher’s teaching methods are beyond harsh; they’re abusive. He hurls furniture and breaks instruments. He throws around homophobic, anti-Semitic, racist and sexist slurs with outrageous regularity. He justifies his actions by saying he pushes his students beyond where they think they can go, and that’s how the world will get its next great jazz musician; the next Louis Armstrong or Buddy Rich should be able to handle some emotional battery and a flying chair here and there. But is there a line dividing motivation and abuse? Are his morally reprehensive teaching methods justified if they get results? That’s a question that goes tantalizingly unanswered.

The two core performances are fantastic, yes, and Simmons has almost certainly earned himself an Oscar nod, but my goodness are the soundtrack, editing, and direction great. The percussive, dense jazz pieces meld with dark drones to make a fascinating mix. Director Damien Chazelle makes watching Andrew practice in his bedroom as tense and bombastic as any boxing montage or battlefield scene, with extreme close ups on blood-splattered crashing cymbals and overhead shots showing Andrew’s insane movement around his drum kit. The jazz ensemble performances are some of the best cinematic depictions of musical performance I’ve ever seen. The editing is lively and dynamic, cutting back and forth rhythmically from instrument to instrument while still holding focus on Andrew’s drumming. You don’t just feel the music; you get the feeling of performing the music, the spontaneity of it all and how everything can come crashing down with the tiniest mistake. All of it combines to create a feeling of unease and tension throughout the entirety of the movie, from the first encounter between Andrew and Fletcher to the climactic final scene, which literally had me on the edge of my seat with my heart pounding in my chest.Whiplash is the most exciting movie of the year so far. More intense than Edge of Tomorrow, more unsettling than Gone Girl, more suspenseful than most horror movies. All this from a movie about a jazz drummer.Grade: A-

Vampires. We’re all probably tired of them.Only Lovers Left Alive centers on the appropriately named Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), vampires who have lived and loved for hundreds and hundreds of years. Adam is a reclusive musician living in Detroit; Eve is a literary hound living in Tangiers, Morocco, with her longtime friend Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). Certain circumstances force one to finally travel and meet the other, and the first half of the film just follows Adam and Eve around as they spend time together, take midnight drives, play chess, drink blood. Things take a chaotic turn in the second half when Eve’s sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) visits from Los Angeles, but the majority of the film focuses on Adam and Eve.

The whole thing would be moot without two very capable actors to hold it down; in the wrong hands, Only Lovers Left Alive would be pretentious and unbearably full of itself. But Tilda Swinton—who has been on fire this year between this, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Snowpiercer—and Tom Hiddleston—most well-known as Loki in The Avengers and Thor—are nothing short of perfect. Adam and Eve feel lived-in, like they really have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. They interact with each other so comfortably and so naturally. They flirt as only lifelong lovers can. Hiddleston, always clad in black, feels weighed down by his years of existence, depressed at humanity’s endless cycles of death and destruction and choosing to hole himself up in his dilapidated Detroit apartment. Swinton is the opposite; always in white, she soaks herself in humanity, visiting Moroccan cafes and relaxing down by the docks. Swinton and Hiddleston inhabit these characters so fully and make these nearly immortal hip vampires believable and beautiful. I could watch them hang out for hours.Only Lovers Left Alive also creates an atmosphere I just wanted to wrap myself in. Adam prowls the dark, abandoned streets of Detroit in his retrofitted white 80s Jaguar; Eve stalks the orange- and green-tinted alleyways of Tangiers wrapped in her white shawls and other articles of clothing. The exceptional soundtrack by lute player Jozef van Wissem and director Jim Jarmusch’s own band SQÜRL is appropriately split into two halves: Detroit and Tangiers. Each half is distinct due to instrumentation and style—Detroit features echoic electric guitars and methodic drums, while Tangier relies more on van Wissem’s lute—but are united in their dark, sensual mood. It’s my favorite musical score of the year because it’s at once beautiful and moody and it provides a perfect accompaniment to what we see on screen. It’s impossible to imagine Adam and Eve wandering around after dark without the eerie, sensual lute always present in the background, and it’s equally impossible to listen to the ancient guitar without visualizing the pair of star-crossed immortal lovers strolling the backstreets.

The film establishes the basics about the ins and outs of the ways vampires live and function easily and quickly. In our modern medical age, they take blood from banks and hospitals rather than gruesomely drawing from right from the source. Drinking blood has a kind of narcotic effect. These details and others are established not through clunky exposition or voiceovers, but just in the way Adam and Eve go about their lives. They have settled into certain habits one would expect from centuries-old beings. But all these details of vampire life remain just that: details. The film is most interested in the simple fact that Adam and Eve have existed for so long, and they have spent their time becoming knowledgeable about the world, about the arts and the sciences. Adam has known the greatest musical minds in human history and uses Tesla’s rejected ideas to power his home; Eve reads books in every language from every time period and hangs out with the still-living actual author of Shakespeare’s works. It’s fascinating to watch the two of them lazing around, musing about how cool Mary Wollstonecraft was, or why Adam gave that one piece to Schubert that one time, or how all the really fun stuff was in the Middle Ages and the Crusades.

Only Lovers Left Alive is more than anything a love story, sensual and fascinating, beautifully realized with cinematography and music and brought to life by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. It’s one of my favorite movies of the year.